Interacting with a Browser

Now that we have a piece of dynamic code which dynamically changes the color and salutation of our site depending on the time of day, we should strongly consider affecting our new web page based on the person who is visiting us.

There are many, many tags in Lasso which would let us do so. Some examples;

[Referrer_URL] returns a link to the previous page which the current visitor was viewing in their Web browser.
[Client_Browser] returns the type of browser used by the current client. 
[Client_IP] returns the IP address of the computer of the client.

For example, we could check to see if someone is using Internet Explorer 6.0 (which all of us web developers hate with a passion), and if they are, send the person somewhere else.

[if:(Client_Browser)>>'Internet Explorer 6"]
[redirect_url:'www.firefox.org']
[/if]

This little piece of nifty code uses conditional logic to automatically forward anyone using ie6 to a Forefox download page. Perhaps this is too aggressive, so instead, we might just give them a message

[if:(Client_Browser)>>'Internet Explorer 6"]
What are you, a luddite?! Upgrade your browser already!
[/if]

Perhaps we also want to check if they are from our competitor, and we want to change the site dynamically to show something else, if they were previously surfing a competitor's website;

[if:(Referrer_URL)>>'www.python.org"]
Lasso is faster than Python. Nah nah nah!
[/if]

Next Tutorial: Sending Email